House Trader — AI Options Trading Agent

House Trader is an autonomous options trading agent that sells credit spreads — specifically bull put spreads — on liquid stocks like AAPL, TSLA, and QQQ. The architecture has two layers. On the bottom: deterministic rules. A scanner pulls live option chains through Alpaca's Market Data API, pairs contracts into five-dollar-wide spreads, and a signal validator filters them by delta, credit-to-width ratio, and implied volatility rank. On top sits the AI brain. An LLM (GLM 5.3-flash, with GLM 5.2 as fallback) receives validated signals along with portfolio state and picks which trades to execute. It considers diversification, credit quality, and proximity to major events. If both models are down, the agent falls back to deterministic sorting — trading never stops. The key constraint: the AI cannot override risk gates. It chooses from pre-approved signals — it cannot invent trades or bypass limits. Every AI decision is logged with the model used, signals offered versus picked, and full reasoning. Risk gates are hard-coded: 2% max loss per trade, 5 open positions max, 10% total portfolio risk, 3 trades per day, and a forced flatten before Non-Farm Payrolls. Exit rules run every 60 seconds: take profit at 50%, stop loss at 2x, and a touch stop when the short leg delta gets too hot. We ran paper trading on a $100,000 portfolio over three days. Five spreads, all closed before NFP — zero exposure through the event. Final equity: $100,090.51. We also discovered a legging bug in exits and documented it with a specified fix. Honest systems find their own bugs. House Trader was built by a human-AI team: Eliza (strategy), Claude Code (full agent code, slides, documentation), and Shurf — a GLM 5.3 instance who reviewed the code, adapted parameters, and wrote the AI brain module.